While My Boyfriend Was Sleeping

What I write after Joe and Henry go to bed

Archives for March 2009

No disrespect to missing dogs

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Once upon a time, on a day too dark and chilly for sunbathing, my sister PK and I sat in my living room in St. Pete, telling stories about odd apartment neighbors.
PK lives next door to a guy who used to keep his kid’s hamster in a cage outside his apartment, presumably because tenants aren’t allowed to have pets.
One day the hamster just disappeared. Gone. Cage and all.
Inspired by the number of missing dog signs in my neighborhood, PK and I designed a hypothetical missing hamster sign.
MISSING HAMSTER
REWARD $75
Male teddy bear hamster
Age: 2 1/2
Has small ears, tiny eyes and strawberry blonde fur
Has black fleck on front right paw
Last seen on wheel
Call: ###
And yes, we printed out a dozen copies and tacked them to telephone poles around my neighborhood.
Please don’t chastise me. I’m a sucker for missing animals. Remember Pooh Bear?
Lighten up and do something funny for the helluvit. It’s April Fool’s Day – nine days before my birthday! For hoax-y inspiration, click here.
—
PS. Please swing by Name Your Dream Assignment and vote for my friend Ricci. I’ve sung her praises numerous times. She’s an amazing photographer and she has only a few days left to win this contest. Voting ends April 3.

There’s fairy dust on my keyboard.

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My mother told me this when she and my dad were out visiting last week. It was the first time I’d heard this story and I thought it explained a great deal everything:

When I was about five years old, I moseyed into my bedroom with an ice cream come. You know the type that come in a big store-bought box? The kind that go stale in 10 minutes if you don’t roll down the packaging immediately after opening?

Those kind of cones.

I loved them even without ice cream scooped on top. They were a nice cardboard-flavored snack.

I reckon biting into stale ice cream cones is a fine way to hurry along loose teeth and considering I was fairly cash-strapped at five, gnawing on these things until teeth fell out was probably a small price to pay for dividends from the Bank of Tooth Fairy.

So yes, on this particular day I lost a tooth. And when I woke up in the morning and the tooth was gone from under my pillow and a dollar bill was in its place, I noticed that cone crumbs were in my bed and on my floor in a trail leading out the door.

“MOM!” I yelled. “COME HERE!”

Pointing to the crumbs, oblivious to where they’d come from, I explained that the tooth fairy must have left dust in my room.

My mother, amused and well aware of my sloppy eating habits, let me believe the crumbs were fairy dust and entertained my request for a sandwich baggie so I could bring them to kindergarten class that morning for show and tell.

A few days later, when my teacher saw my mother, she said, “Nice touch with the tooth fairy stuff. Crumbling up food and calling it fairy dust. Cute.”

My mother replied, “It wasn’t me, Kathy. She walked into her bedroom that day with an ice cream cone and dropped crumbs all over her bed. When she woke up in the morning she was convinced they’d come from the tooth fairy.”

Thank you Mom, for letting me believe in things like this. I love you.

—

PS. That’s me up there in the pumpkin patch, showing off my baby teeth.

Learning to sit still and write

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I learned a long time ago that newspaper stories don’t always flow like wordy liquid from the fingertips.

The process is usually … how I do I put it?

Painful.

As a 16-year-old cub reporter (or as my first editor called me, “a stringer”) I would drive home after covering three-hour town board meetings in a rural town where the council members’ various concerns included accidental or deliberate manure seepage by farmers driving their tractors up village roads.

I had to summon an army of self-disciplined brain cells to write about this stuff. When I’d return from these meetings, I typically had two days to produce a story, which I understand is a virtual god-send for daily newspaper reporters.

(I’ve always written for weeklies. I still haven’t decided if it’s because I’m too slow or too intimidated by the pace. I think it’s the latter. Daily newspaper reporters, if they’re lucky enough to still have jobs, can’t afford to lollygag. I have a good friend who works at a daily newspaper in Southwest Florida, who often returns to the newsroom after beastly city commission meetings, and busts ass on a story until midnight with his editor lurking over his shoulder, insisting he call a source who just a week ago announced at a planning board meeting that all reporters are lousy muckrakers hellbent on manipulating quotes.)

So, yes. I write for weeklies. To motivate myself I often set Reese’s Cups beside the computer. For every 300 words written, I get one Reese’s Cup. Depending on the length of the story it’s possible that I’ve consumed an entire 8-pack of Reese’s in just one afternoon.

It’s a motivation/reward system.

Back when I still worked in a newsroom, before I started doing this job from home, I would reward myself with several vodka cranberry cocktails at a bar down the road, where a guy named Nick played Spanish love songs on a small guitar.

The motivation/reward system is precarious. Over the years, I’ve repeatedly failed to achieve many of my personal deadlines, which means I’ve plodded back to the kitchen with handfuls of uneaten Reese’s, pissed off at my lack of ambition, or even worse, my propensity to procrastinate.

I knew I was a glutton for punishment when my high school newspaper internship turned into a reporter gig that lasted an excruciatingly gratifying three years.

Things I used to do the day after town board meetings to avoid pumping out 500 words on the board’s decision to turn down the construction of a telecommunications tower:

1. Walk to the bathroom and put on my mother’s red lipstick. Wipe it off with toilet paper. Reapply. Wipe it off again.
2. Perform handstands against my closet door.
3. Call my friend Ro and gossip about nonsense.
4. Eat dinner with my family extra slowly, impersonating a councilwoman whose voice sounded like Lily Tomlin sucking tennis balls through a vacuum cleaner.
5. Tear out useless notes, crumple them into balls and chuck them at my sister Heelya, whom I shared a room with.
6. Sign onto AOL and submit poetry to writers’ Web sites.
7. Re-read dogeared pages from Alice in Wonderland and type sentences only the Mad Hatter would say.
8. Hold down the fast-forward button on my hand-held tape recorder, amused by how council members sound less irritating as chipmunks.
9. Do homework.
10. Daydream about becoming a marine biologist.

Ten years later very little has changed, except of course that I’ve fine-tuned my motivation/reward system.

Yesterday after finishing a story on deadline, I rewarded myself with an Adirondack chair.

When Joe and I first moved into our house, we pedaled our bikes on a cobblestone roundabout, where we passed a small house with one Adirondack chair in the front yard with a sign tacked to it that read: ADIRONDACK CHAIRS FOR SALE. CALL ###.

I made Joe memorize the phone number and when we got home I jotted it down on a piece of cardboard torn from an empty case of Pepsi. I decided when I was ready to jazz up the front yard, I’d call and purchase a proper chair from a craftsman in my neighborhood.

Yesterday, while blundering through a halfway interesting lede for a mostly boring story, I decided to fish through the kitchen junk drawer for the chairmaker’s phone number. When I called it, an old guy named Ernie answered in a Long Island accent.

“Hey there,” I said. “Do you sell Adirondack chairs?”

“Sure do,” he said.

“You make ’em yourself?”

“Yes m’am. I got two right now. One made out of cypress. One made out of cedar.”

(When he said cedar, he sounded like seeda. Oh, downstaters!)

“How much you selling them for?”

“Ninety-nine bucks.”

“Listen,” I said. “I’m on deadline trying to finish a story. As soon as I crank it out, I’ll be over.”

At 5:30 I headed over with $125. I wanted a table too and Ernie had suggested he had other bits and pieces of furniture for sale.

When I got to his house, eight blocks away from mine, I knocked on his front door and heard a woman say, “Ernie! We have company.”

Ernie opened the door, shook my hand, and took me to his back porch, where he told me how he makes his chairs using plans designed by some Bob Vila-type guy on PBS, and how he purchases his wood from a guy who lives in the sticks an hour outside of St. Pete, and how cypress is insect-repellent and how he and his wife are going on a cruise next week through the Panama Canal.

“You know much about the Panama Canal?” Ernie asked.

“Not really,” I said.

“Ya know 27,000 men died building the Panama Canal.”

“Really?”

“Yellow fever and malaria. They didn’t know about mosquitas then.”

“27,000 men. Jesus.”

“I know,” said Ernie, wringing his head. “The French tried to build it in the 1800s, but after so many men died they gave up on it and Teddy Roosevelt stepped in and finished the job.”

“Wow, and now we motor up and down it in luxury cruise liners.”

Ernie smiled and hoisted a cypress Adirondack chair into my trunk.

“Do you have a little table I can set beside it?” I asked.

“Sure do,” he said, pointing to a crude plywood table by his garage with a dusty flower pot on top. “I’ll sell it to you for 25 bucks.”

“How about $15?”

He paused for a second, reached for the flower pot and said, “Ahh, alright,” tying the table to the Adirondack chair with a piece of twine and fastening my trunk shut with a bungee cord.

“Where do you live?” He asked.

“30th and 2nd Street,” I said.

“Ah. The center of the universe.”

“Yeah!” I said, reaching into my wallet for cash.

“‘$114,” he said.

I handed him $115 and told him to keep the buck.

He thanked me, tugged on the twine and the bungee cords and declared the rigging safe for at least 10 blocks.

“I tell ya what I do in my Adirondack chair,” he said. “I get me a cold drink and I set it on the arm rests, then I lay back with my feet out in front of me and I think to myself, life is great and I’ve got no complaints.”

—
PS. I tried to write this post from the Adirondack chair, but it’s too bright in my front yard. Must build porch!

short & sweet

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LOVE THIS.

It’s beautiful and clever, simple and joyful. I wanted to bump Steve-O’s ugly mug down a notch with something Zen and inspirational, and when I saw this stop-motion video on my friend Ricci’s blog, I gasped and said A-HA! I had not heard of Oren Lavie until this afternoon, so thank you Ricci for giving me something pretty to watch/listen/ and reflect to.

For those of you who’ve filled up on ugly stories today, consider this dessert:

Go dupe yourself.

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ABC, you’ve got to be kidding me.

I apologize if I’m late to the game here, but after watching The Insider tonight I learned that Steve-O, the jackass (at left) with a lobster clamped to his tongue, was hauled off Dancing With the Stars by an ambulance last week, after injuring his back rehearsing the tango.

Steve-O, the masochistic clown ABC lovingly refers to as “MTV’s Jackass prankster,” apparently pulled a muscle.

ABC, stop patronizing your viewers.

You expect people to believe that Steve-O, a man who stapled his nuts to his thighs, pierced his ass cheeks together, swallowed a worm through his nose, injected vodka (intravenously) though his legs and pole-vaulted through glass doors, ceiling fans, tables, and trees; Steve-O has a bad back.

ABC, have you no shame?

First you script Bachelor Jason Mesnick’s “change of heart,” then you stick his jilted cheerleader on (surprise, surprise) Dancing With the Stars, and now you’re telling us that Steve-O, a scrawny coke addict who once turned his tattooed body into a human dartboard, has suffered a pinched nerve?

What next? Steve-O signs on for four episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, wherein he undergoes back surgery and falls in love with a cancer-stricken Katherine Heigl?

In other news, it’s me and Joe’s two-year anniversary. I insisted he wear his Area 51 T shirt to celebrate the occasion.

Man, he looks adorable in it.

Ani, if you’re out there, thank you.

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10 reasons why I love Ani DiFranco:

1. Her voice is creamy. Seriously. Like vanilla pudding. It’s a beautiful juxtaposition – somewhere between angelic and fierce. If Ani were singing shit about my pug, I’d turn up the volume and sing along. She’s that captivating.

2. Her songwriting is AMAZING. I picture her scratching out lyrics between coffee refills in diner booths. Or on the back porch of her home in Buffalo, under an awning, in the rain, making sense of bad relationships, her 20s, her 30s, politics and pollution.

3. She’s from Buffalo. My hometown. And without too much preaching, she became the poster child for a steel belt city with a reputation steeped in bad football jokes, blizzards and economic woes. A few years ago she purchased a historic church on the corner of West Tupper and Delaware Avenue, rehabbed it, reopened it as a music venue and called it Babeville.

4. She is 11 years older than me, but it never felt that way. In the mid-1990s, when I first started listening to Ani, newspapers and magazines labeled her militant, angsty, angry, gay, bisexual, feminist, rocker grrrl, younameit. As a teenager, I couldn’t think of a better chick to idolize. She was complex; a Rubik’s cube of sexual identity, with song lyrics like poems, marked by peaks and valleys in an emotional landscape not unlike the one I pounded. Britney Spears and I are the same age. (Arrggh! It’s true!) Yet it was Ani I latched onto like a long-distance pen pal. (Ani and Jewel to be exact.) From my bedroom in the middle of nowhere, with its pink walls and quilted bunk bed blankets, I spent my nights alternating between Ani and Jewel, a cross-pollination of a fan. Romantic and wispy. Pent-up and pissy.

5. She can fingerpick a hoedown beat like nobody’s business. Ani could pluck a love song using her guitar strings to clean out the grit from under her fingernails. She’s that fast and that good.

6. She’s a journalist’s wet dream. She’s funny, disarming and ridiculously quotable. (“Some people wear their heart up on their sleeve. I wear mine underneath my right pant leg, strapped to my boot.”) Even her terseness is eloquent. (“My songs are just little letters to me.”)

7. She’s a stubborn success story. Ani has repeatedly turned down baller contracts with major record companies. She formed Righteous Records in 1989 with Dale Anderson, a writer from The Buffalo News, and renamed the company Righteous Babe Records in 1994 after she and Anderson parted ways. The company now produces a growing list of emerging artists – Andrew Bird, Bitch and Animal, Arto Lindsay, Sara Lee and Hammell on Trial to name a few.

8. Her song, Angry Anymore, was my anthem for years. Listen to it. It’s cathartic.

9. Fuck you at the start of a refrain never sounded so pretty or so appropriate. Untouchable Face is a lyrical feat of genius.

10. She is finally happy, and I’m happy for her.

—

PS. Joe took me to the Tampa Theatre last night to see Ani. The tickets were a Christmas present. (Thank you, Joe!) I cried tears of happiness during the show. It was dark, so no one saw.


***

Roaming minutes

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Just called my father, expecting it to be my mother. Since I’m all lazy and easy-like-Sunday morning, I figured I’d sort out this Popple tail thing over the phone.

“Hello Mothership.”
“(Snort sound) This is your Fathership.”
“Oh, Fathership. What’s up with you?”
“I’m at 2,000 feet.”
“In the plane?”
“Yup. Flying over Lake Erie right now. It’s frozen from shore to shore.”
“I think you get better reception over Lake Erie than you do on Jennings Road.”
“(Snort sound.) Yeah, I know.”
My father has a two-seater Cessna named Isabella that he and my Opa bought when I was about 11 years old. He got it shortly after he got his pilot’s license – the culmination of months of night school, instrument training, a bevy of other FAA-regulated requirements and a medical exam.
Opa doesn’t have his license. 
When my dad flies, Opa sits next to him, living vicariously through the plane’s passenger seat controls. 
Oma wasn’t too thrilled about Isabella. Neither was my mother. Night school was expensive and logging miles with a flight instructor cost even more. 
The airplane however, when compared to what other men spend on less impressive toys, was cheap – relatively speaking. My dad had to entirely rebuild the engine. The labor cost nothing. He did it himself. 
My mother calls Isabella, “The Other Woman.” In fact, she’s the one who named the plane Isabella. I think it made the hobby easier to digest – my father nurturing something human instead of machine. We women personalize everything. I think I Lanced about this already. Oh yeah. Briefly, here. 
Anyway, my dad answered the phone. 2,000 feet in the air. Buzzing Lake Erie. 
“Whatcha up to kiddo?”
“Joe’s got a cold and I’m lounging around, eating pizza. A photographer friend is taking engagement pictures of us and the pug tonight.”
“Engagement pictures?”
“Yeah. I wasn’t going to do ’em, but he offered to take them for a case of beer. I think he wants glamour shots of the pug for his portfolio.” 
“What do people do with engagement pictures?”
“I don’t know. Put them in a giant frame for people to sign at their wedding, I suppose.”
“Hmm. Well that’s pretty nice of him, to take them for free.”
(Yeah. Too bad Joe is sick and the pug has eczema in his facial folds.)

“Dad, you’re talking to me in the airplane, but I can barely hear the engine.”
“You know it’s great! I’ve got the cell phone stuck under my headset with both hands free and I can still hear the radio controls.”
(And to think, he lectures me whenever I drive and talk on the phone.)
“Yesterday I was machining a part for your cousin Cory’s truck and I figured I’d fly over his house to see if he was working on it today. Sure enough, saw him in the driveway, puttin’ the alternator in.”
“You were spying on him from the air?”
“Sure. I called him up too. Told him I was watching him from the sky. He looked up and started laughing.”
—
PS. I took the first two photos about three years ago while flying one summer with my dad over North Collins, N.Y. (my hometown.) If you squint, in that first one you can see our house. 
PPS. The third photo is him and Isabella, sharing a private moment. 
PPPS. The video below is Joe’s first date with Isabella. 

My pug gets better mileage than your SUV.

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An ode to my pug’s paws:

I haven’t met a dog fanatic who hasn’t expressed joy over their pet’s exquisite paws.
My pug’s paws are works of art. The black pads, all circular and button-like, get so rough I want to exfoliate my face with them. They feel like the old upholstery buttons on my parent’s scratchy couch. 
Whenever we go for long walks, I’m grateful for the pug’s durable pads. They can endure sticks and stones and random sharp sidewalk debris. Honestly, the pug’s paws are better equipped for outdoor traversing than the shitty flip-flops I wear every day.
Sometimes he will get a thorn stuck between his pads, and rather than howl and whimper with his paw in the air, he will soldier on – 27 pounds of pug marching onward into the neighborhood with a limp so slight passing dogs barely notice he’s lost rhythm. 
The paws themselves smell like corn chips. Many dog’s paws smell this way. I know it’s disgusting and you may think me vile for it, but I love to sniff the pug’s paws. Like a kid with a runny nose seeking out his favorite germ-drenched blanket, the pug’s paws fill me with a fuzzy warmth that coats my heart in cashmere and aids in the flow of serotonin. 
And the fur! The fur looks like wood grain on a two-by-four leg of lumber cut from an ancient oak tree – so straight and so smooth when you pet with the grain, and so course and so stiff when you pet against the grain. 
But it’s the pads that impress me most. It’s the pads that I envy when I look at my own fleshy feet. 
When the pug and I camped across the country, he stepped on many a wicked thorn, nosed around in many a pricker bush, popped a squat on many unforgiving cacti, but no pointy plant was too sharp for his dime-sized paw pads. 
His paws shatter toy breed stereotypes. They are as rugged and rigged for outdoor adventure as the paws on a Bernese Mountain Dog. 
If it weren’t for my pug’s vacuum-sealed face, he’d have soared over sand dunes in Bandon Beach, Ore. with the ease of a heron.  
If it weren’t for his asthmatic lungs, I’m certain he would have combed the The Rockies like a mountain lion hunting elk at dusk.
If not for his diesel engine pulmonary system, combusting externally in the North Carolina heat, I’m confident the pug’s muscled legs would have carried him up the Blue Ridge Mountains to the top of the Grove Park Inn, where together we would’ve sipped tea in high-backed Adirondack chairs facing the sunset.
And perhaps if his sausage roll body had been a little less eggplant-shaped, we’d have frolicked the Ozarks like Maria and Captain Von Trapp. 
If the rest of him would keep up, my pug’s paws would outperform Firestone Tires. 
—
PS. Photo of my courageous pug after he lumbered his way to the top of a red rock formation in Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs. 
PPS. When the pug is not ascending sedimentary beds of sandstone, he slumbers on top of Joe’s head in a queen-sized bed in St. Petersburg, Fla.
PPPS. Note: I purposely did not mention the pug’s trifling dewclaw. 

Nana never sucked it in.

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Mail from my Nana is the best thing on earth.

She likes to write me letters on tree bark and toilet paper.

Last month I scribbled her a Valentine on a maxi pad.

In return she sent me this note with a magazine clipping inside.

The note reads:


Hello Heidi–

Just had to send you this article that I received from Aunt Shirl. Oh, how true it is! I certainly remember my first “rubber” Playtex girdle. Several of my friends were sold on them. They flattened your tummy, but pushed the excess up to your boobs. Really a tight fit. It would get mighty uncomfortable, especially if a girl had a large stomach and hips. God, what we didn’t do to try and look glamorous. Nowadays the girls go panty-free!

Well, I just had to get this to you for your Lance. I think it’s an article everyone will enjoy – I certainly did. Have a great week and say hello to Joe for me.

Love,
Nana

The magazine clipping, if you can read it:

And Nana’s trademark cursive of course.